Every fighting game franchise has them. Those characters where people keep saying “but they have to be there, otherwise it’s not the same.” It’s a tale as old as time and honestly, in today’s fighting landscape, it’s more relevant than ever.
The knowledge on fighting game developers’ part that they’re going to be supporting games potentially for years and have lots of room for post-launch content means that pushing the roster in before release isn’t the same type of concern anymore. But that also leads to its own share of problems…
What brought this to mind for me to write about at all was actually an X post I saw from user 4th Snake which I’ll embed below.
The more “must-haves” you demand in every sequel’s roster, the less newcomers and uncommon characters you get to see. Please consider that before complaining that they missed one game in twenty years. pic.twitter.com/MxkZmiQAOK
— The4thSnake (@4thSnake) March 19, 2025
The post shows some of the most recurring Mortal Kombat characters and how most of them haven’t missed a game recently, remarking that if you keep referring to these characters as “must-haves”, then the less rare characters or potential newcomers will show up.
It’s a valid concern, to be sure. The picture for Mortal Kombat’s roster through the last few games shows pretty clearly how many spots tend to be taken up by the “usual suspects”, and it’s definitely not just something that happens with Mortal Kombat.
Street Fighter has gone out of its way to include the World Warriors from Street Fighter 2 at every turn, Tekken despite launching with a larger roster than its rivals has gotten complaints about Anna occupying the same spot back-to-back in Tekken 7 and 8, which is the first DLC character of the game’s second season and there’s more where that came from.
Even with Virtua Fighter you can see it, I wrote a piece recently about how the series only ever cut a character once, but maintaining the core roster has also led to the game having fairly few new characters for each of its iterations.
So, this being a thing in fighting games is well-established and nobody would really try to deny it. But is it a problem? Now that’s an entirely different discussion. Let’s weight some pros and cons on the issue.
Let’s make one thing clear — people like what they know. This is a pretty universal truth and it’s no different in fighting games.
If someone grew up playing Street Fighter 2 and they want to buy the new game, they’re going to be looking for who they used to play as a kid. If they’re not there, odds are they won’t buy it.
Now, of course, this isn’t a universal truth, but there are trends that point to it. One thing we can look at is how many fighting games tried to reinvent themselves by cutting most of their old cast, and while they didn’t all flop, it’s not like most of them really brought the series to new heights either.
The most infamous example, Street Fighter 3, often gets brought up, though I want to take this opportunity to point out that I think it’s an oversimplification to say that was the whole issue with the game.
One of the core reasons that Street Fighter 3 suffered due to roster choices wasn’t just that they removed characters people loved from Street Fighter 2, but also that Capcom were concurrently running two separate Street Fighter series, the Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter EX franchises, which did contain all or most of the old favorites.
It was something of a self-sabotage and when fans were confronted with picking between a roster where they didn’t really recognize anyone or one of the two games that had all the world warriors, they would naturally gravitate more to what they already knew.
That said, Street Fighter 3 is far from the only example of this happening in fighting games. Soul Calibur 5 replaced the majority of the old characters and was not embraced well, Garou: Mark of the Wolves was not a flop by any means but it also happened to end the Fatal Fury series for 25 years until Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves which releases on April 24th, 2025.
Mortal Kombat itself had this issue as well with lots of characters being introduced during the so-called “3D era” of games between Mortal Kombat 3 and Mortal Kombat 9, many of which either took a very long time to return or never did at all.
Perhaps the best example of a fighting game which did big roster cuts but still succeeded was Tekken 3, though in their case they replaced many of the old cast members like Kazuya and Michelle with their children (Jin and Julia, respectively), thereby making it so that fans of the old characters could still gravitate to their new counterparts.
In short, having characters that people know and are accustomed to tends to be a fairly safe bet. But, one can go too far in that direction as well…
The issue with having too many iron-clad slots on your roster is that you risk stagnation.
Season 2 of Tekken 7 was well-received by many and brought back several favorites who missed the cut in the initial roster, but after seeing Anna be the first Season 2 DLC for Tekken 8 as well, fans are starting to feel a bit weary.
Although the rest of the season pass is still unknown, Marduk, Lei, Armor King and Julia are all quite popular characters who once again missed out on the launch roster of Tekken 8 just like they did back in Tekken 7, so it’s definitely not outside the realm of possibility that we’ll see one or more of them show up for this pass again.
A similar situation already occurred in Tekken 8’s first season where Lidia Sobieska, a character who was the final DLC and final new character in Tekken 7 is early DLC instead of being on the launch roster, prompting many fans to vent their frustrations at having to pay twice for the same character in a relatively short span of years.
When you load up on characters that you deem absolutely essential to your roster, it can lead to many repeat scenarios like this where the same characters show up in the same spots over and over again and risk making everything feel stagnant for long-time fans.
While Street Fighter has avoided this specific issue, Street Fighter has an entirely different problem related to their insistence on keeping the World Warriors around (more so in 6 than 5, since several of them ended up being DLC in 5 but all are in the main roster of 6) and that is popular characters simply never showing up at all.
During the Street Fighter 4 era when Capcom held an official character popularity poll Karin topped the vote in Japan and placed highly outside of Japan as well.
Now, granted, Karin showed up for Street Fighter 5 which was a few years after the poll had been conducted, but the fact that she’d been asked for throughout all of Street Fighter 4 but never showed up was still strange.
It isn’t an isolated issue either — mid-way through Street Fighter 5 back in 2018, Makoto placed 2nd and Q placed 4th in Capcom’s next Street Fighter character poll. Neither of them were ever included and indeed neither of them are present now in Street Fighter 6 either.
The most recent such poll we have from Capcom, which is from 2024, was conducted in-game in Street Fighter 6 and thus focused primarily on people who already owned the game so it gives a different type of results and it’s honestly a bit too new to be factored in to anything just yet, but the results tell a similar tale.
Here, we again see Makoto very high up in the charts, this time being exceeded by Akira from Rival Schools who debuted in Street Fighter 5.
What I’m trying to say with this is, the more characters you reserve slots for either on the launch roster or as DLC for this season or that season, the more popular characters that fans are crying out for get ignored.
It’s no surprise to see characters that fans don’t like miss the cut and it’s also no surprise if companies want to hold off on popular characters for the next game, like Capcom did with Karin for Street Fighter 5.
But when you have provably popular characters that fans are crying out for simply never showing up at all because you’ve bordered off roster spots for characters that may be iconic but not necessarily popular (for example Dhalsim in particular but also E. Honda both tend to do terribly in all of the polls listed above), what’s even the point of keeping the roster locked off to specific characters?
It may be a copout answer, but to me personally a mid-way balance is best. If we’re going to use Street Fighter as an example since it’s likely what most readers are familiar with, I think that characters like Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Cammy and Guile are mainstays and should probably always be in the roster.
Conversely, I think that some like Dhalsim or E. Honda should maybe not be guarantees every time and leave some space for favorites who have been absent for a while. To Capcom’s credit, they did do this in Street Fighter 5 by holding Blanka and E. Honda off of the launch roster, but inexplicably reversed course for Street Fighter 6 anyway.
This obviously goes for every franchise — Mortal Kombat’s original 7 could maybe stand to have 3 of them absent at once sometimes (which I do realize is the case in Mortal Kombat 1 to some extent since Sonya and Kano are just Kameos) and Tekken could be a bit more flexible in which picks have to split off the launch roster and wait for DLC chances.
The full on approach we’ve seen where fighting game developers insist on including every one of their most classic characters at once or just shake up the entire roster from its very foundation seems like a flawed one.
Tekken 3 probably did it best all those years ago by having a healthy mix of newcomers, passing the torch from legacy to new on some characters and a solid amount of classic fighters all mixed together.
Especially in this age where content is becoming much more slow-drip and fighting games are lasting much longer before any sequel is released, it really would be nice to have just a tiny bit more variety, don’t you think?
Source: Event Hubs
